Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is changing the way in which industries provide business services. E-commerce web sites, web portals, and other electronic purchasing systems can provide rapid and fully automated arms-length purchasing transactions and comparison shopping. Typical automated purchasing systems are designed for the purchase of known product configurations. For products requiring specialized preparation, testing, handling, and care, or for which unknown factors need to be determined, traditional e-commerce system designed for pre-configured product sales and distribution may be inappropriate. Consequently, improved e-commerce systems able to handle more complex product sales and configuration issues are desired.
Improved e-commerce systems handling complex product sales and configuration issues can benefit the chemical industry as well as many other industries. Chemical manufacturers may sell chemicals that have application-specific and formulation-specific characteristics. Application-specific and formulation-specific characteristics of a new product or new application of an existing product may be unknown. In such cases, prior to product use, a purchaser may need to separately contract for, or otherwise engage in, product formulation, testing and other suitability assurance processes. Advantages can be gained by streamlining these processes using a computer-automated system.